Professor Edgar Stach is the first faculty member of the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to receive a joint appointment with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the university.

Through the year-long position at ORNL, Stach will research and develop technologies and methods to achieve cost effective, energy-efficient applications for high-performing retrofitted and new buildings.

“Energy is our most precious global resource and buildings are the largest consumer of energy,” Stach said. “As architects, we are at the center of decision-making in this arena and play a key role in saving energy and making buildings more efficient and even capable of generating energy.”

Stach will have access to the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center at ORNL and will be expected to take advantage of collaborative opportunities between the university and the laboratory. He will also oversee two graduate architecture students at the lab, who will assist in his research on high-performance building envelopes—the physical layers between a building’s interior and exterior environments.

“The College of Architecture and Design is enormously pleased and excited to have the opportunity to partner with ORNL through Professor Edgar Stach’s joint faculty appointment,” said Scott Wall, director of architecture. “Professor Stach has been instrumental in providing leadership in the development of research through technical application over the past several years. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a unique resource for the university and the opportunity to develop this relationship over time offers the potential for other kinds of mutually beneficial relationships to be established.”

Lee Riedinger, interim vice chancellor of UT’s Office of Research, called Stach “a leader in the incorporation of solar cell technologies in buildings, as evidenced by the high marks for his Living Light entry in the recent Solar Decathlon competition in Washington, D.C.”

He added that ORNL is very strong in various aspects of photovoltaic research and development “and this joint appointment will help bring the solar cell research programs of the two institutions closer together.”

Stach, during his tenure at UT, has actively engaged technology-based research efforts in architecture, engineering and material science through his projects, the UT Zero House and Living Light, a state-of-the-art, zero-energy house, that placed eighth overall in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon. He also founded the Institute for Smart Structures in 2008, a UT research center that strives to create sustainable building materials, technologies and construction methods.

Stach was recently granted the University of Tennessee Chancellor’s Award and is a James R. Cox Professor, an honor given by the university to faculty members who demonstrate excellence in teaching, scholarship and service.

He joined the university in 1999 and is co-founder of Architekten Klinkhammer and Stach, an architecture firm based in both Cologne and Weimar, Germany.